The one solution I used is:
1. quickpkg devnull's cairo, libXft, fontconfig and freetype packages (emerged with "-cleartype ubuntu"), move them to some other dir on HDD
2. re-emerge this packages with standard use flags ("+cleartype -ubuntu")
3. quckpkg this packages
4. emerge all needed packages (i.e. mozilla-thunderbird)
5. change again flags to "-cleartype ubuntu", and then emerge -K all packages from 1st step

everyting works fine for me, but it's just workaround, so next time You'll have the same problem

I have cairo-1.8.8 / libXft-2.1.13 / freetype-2.3.9-r1 from devnull with "cleartype" use flag. Also have fontconfig-2.6.0-r2 (from devnull with cleartype use flag). Switched to fontconfig-2.7.2 (also from devnull with cleartype use flag). For the exact same configurations, using fontconfig-2.7.2 makes my fonts resemble their pre-devnull days (ie, looks much worse then with fontconfig-2.6.0-r2 ), so I keep going back to fontconfig-2.6.0-r2. Any idea why this should be the case? Should I switch to the ubuntu use flag?_________________Athlon XP-M 2600 @ 2.3 GHz OC | Abit NF7-S r2.0 | 2x512MB PC3200 | 6600GT OC | Audigy 2 | Gentoo | 2005

Firefox 3.5.6 now strictly depends on cairo 1.8.8 [previous 3.5.x versions were compiling fine with 1.8.6 after change in ebuild], so looks like I'll have to deal with this new cairo. This is how text looks like with:
- cairo 1.8.6,
- freetype 2.3.11,
- fontconfig 2.8.0,
- libXft 2.1.14.

helps with shapes of the letters, but makes them to blurry, most visible in the menu: http://manwe.rootnode.net/cairo3.png . I've tried messing with hint, autohint and lcdfilter but didn't get proper rendering, like with cairo 1.8.6. Any ideas?

Let's not forget about pixman, which cairo depends on, even though we don't need to patch pixman for the improved LCD font rendering.

pixman is currently at 0.16.4. Recompile cairo after upgrading pixman, to follow the dependency order.

See blurry fonts. Add entries to ~/.fonts.conf for specific font renderings that you don't like. This is the hassle that we have to go through, to set up fonts as we like them, on our hardware. Here's my ~/.fonts.conf as an example.

Let's not forget about pixman, which cairo depends on, even though we don't need to patch pixman for the improved LCD font rendering.

Why 0.16.4 i newer than 0.17.2?

PaulBredbury wrote:

See blurry fonts. Add entries to ~/.fonts.conf for specific font renderings that you don't like. This is the hassle that we have to go through, to set up fonts as we like them, on our hardware. Here's my ~/.fonts.conf as an example.

I've started messing with my config, but couldn't get look like with cairo 1.8.6. Then tried your config and... it's great Fonts look fabulous. Thanks for sharing